Summary: A Structural Approach to Latency Prediction
Harsha V. Madhyastha
Thomas Anderson Arvind Krishnamurthy
University of Washington University of Washington University of Washington
Neil Spring Arun Venkataramani
University of Maryland University of Massachusetts Amherst
ABSTRACT
Several models have been recently proposed for predicting the la-
tency of end to end Internet paths. These models treat the Internet
as a black-box, ignoring its internal structure. While these models
are simple, they can often fail systematically; for example, the most
widely used models use metric embeddings that predict no benefit
to detour routes even though half of all Internet routes can benefit
from detours.
In this paper, we adopt a structural approach that predicts path
latency based on measurements of the Internet's routing topology,
PoP connectivity, and routing policy. We find that our approach
outperforms Vivaldi, the most widely used black-box model. Fur-
thermore, unlike metric embeddings, our approach successfully pre-
dicts 65% of detour routes in the Internet. The number of measure-